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Modern Trends

If humanistic psychology was a third force in the 1960s, then today there are fourth and fifth forces in psychology: cognition and neuroscience.

Cognition emphasizes information process­ing within humans, while neuro­science emphasizes the biology of the brain and nervous system. In this course, Chapter 2 is about neuroscience. Cognition is emphasized in Chapter 6 on Memory and Chapter 7 on Cognition, among other places.

Cognitive psychology has roots going back to the mid-1800s. The earliest psychologists, using introspection, were trying to build a science of mind or cognition. Their failure meant that cognitive studies went into eclipse in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th Century.

Some say that Frederic Bartlett, the first professor in experimental psychology at Cambridge University, kept cognitive psychology alive from the 1920s through 1950s. His books Remembering (1932) and Thinking (1958) are still good reads.

Around 1956, psychol­ogists became interested in computer science and information processing. They saw profound similarities between the information processing in computers and humans.

Scholars often trace the beginning of modern cognitive psychology to a now-classic article about human memory by George Miller. Miller pointed out that the concepts of encoding and the organization of information were unavoidable in computer science. He supplied evidence that humans were carrying out encoding and organization of information in memory.

By the late 1960s, psychologists studying memory spoke of an encoding revolution. Memory, it seemed, always involved what a person interpreted (encoded), not just the external stimulus as presented.

For example, the word "bat" could be interpreted as a sports object. In that case, it would be retrieved better if a person was given the hint "ball." But if the word bat was interpreted as a flying mammal, the word "cave" might be a better cue.

Research showed that memory always depended on what people encoded. This had far-reaching implications, because encoding could be influenced in many ways.

To study this, psychologists analyzed how people interpreted information presented to them. That was in contrast to behaviorists who insisted psychologists should confine their attention to visible behavior.

By the late 1970s, the whole field of psychology was enveloped by a cognitive revolution. After years of behaviorism, psychologists no longer saw the mind as an impenetrable black box.

The new emphasis on cognition was rigorous. It was disciplined, objective, and based on precise experimentation. Whenever possible, computer scientists created stimulations to test their intuitions about how cognitive processes worked.

Computer simulations were a very demanding way to test a theory. The success or failure of a computer program was unambiguous. It worked or it did not.

Vague theories about human mental processes went out of style, as cognitive theorists demanded specific, testable proposals. No longer could anybody argue, as the behaviorists had for decades, that discussing mental processes was unscientific.

In their end-of-century analysis of trends in psychology, Robins, Gosling, and Craik (1999) found that "cognitive psychology has sustained a steady upward trajectory" from about 1970 to 2000. They used various measures to arrive at this conclusion. One was the quickly rising number of published research studies in cognitive psychology.

Also revealing was the number of citations of those studies (references to them in other publications) by scientists and news writers outside the discipline of cognitive psychology. That number was high, showing that people outside psychology were interested in cognitive psychology research.

Universities and corporations started hiring more cognitive psychologists, until employment opportunities were more numerous in that field than in many other areas of psychology. That continued to be true in early decades of the 21st Century.

What is evidence that cognitive psychology is gaining influence?

Chapter 7 (Cognition) discusses cognitive psychology as well as other branches of cognitive science, such as AI (artificial intelligence). The term "cognitive science" refers to AI, linguistics, cognitive psych­ology, cognitive neuroscience, and any other research about intelligent behavior.

What is "cognitive science"?

Talk of a cognitive revolution was justified by dramatic changes in experimental psych­ology after 1956. However, such talk irritated behaviorists.

The phrase "scientific revolution" came from Thomas Kuhn's influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The revolution metaphor implied behaviorism was overthrown and replaced, like a deposed monarch.

Kuhn's favorite example was the replace­ment of earth-centered models of the solar system by Galileo's sun-centered model. However, in psychology, no such overthrow occurred.

Behavioral techniques never went away. They are very useful to this day. We will discuss many practical applications of them in Chapter 5 (Conditioning).

Why did talk of a "cognitive revolution" irritate behaviorists?

Cognitive psychology did take over experimental psychology, a term that covers non-clinical laboratory research in psychology. However, in animal research, behavioral techniques remain essential.

In therapy, the walls between behavioral and cognitive perspectives came down. Behavioral psychologists decided inner speech was a behavior that could be modified.

This led to new techniques for modifying self-talk. Cognitive restructuring, the re-interpretation of life situations, became the focus of a new type of therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

A 2007 survey showed that over 90% of therapists in the U.S. used cognitive behavioral therapy at least some of the time. That would have astonished behaviorists of the 1960s and earlier, when behaviorism meant ignoring mental processes.

Neuroscience

If the 1970s was the decade in which cognitive approaches started their big comeback in psychology, then the 1980s was the decade when neuroscientific approaches suddenly became more important. The U.S. Congress declared the 1990s the "decade of the brain" in order to "enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research."

The trend toward more neuroscience research only accelerated since then. Technologies such as brain scanning became used routinely in research about psychological processes.

In typical brain-scanning research, people are asked to perform some cognitive activity while inside a brain imaging machine or wearing headgear with sensors. The activity can be solving a problem, translating a language, recognizing a face, listening to music, telling or listening to a joke, doing arithmetic, praying, imagining a visual scene, anything.

What approach became more dominant in the 1980s? How is brain imaging research conducted?

Mental activity is always correlated with some pattern of activation in specialized areas of the brain. One consistent finding is that imagining something (such as music) produces much the same brain activity as actually perceiving it or acting it out.

When I was revising Chapter 15 (Social Psychology), I was struck by the ubiquity of brain-scanning research. Every classic finding in social psychology (from conformity to obedience to bystander apathy) had been studied using brain scans, in recent years.

For example, bystander effects are a classic topic of social psychology research since the 1960s, but nobody back then thought of investigating brain mechanisms for them. The standard explanation of why people do not intervene to help somebody in need (in a crowd) is "diffusion of responsibility."

A greater number of people nearby dilutes a person's feeling of responsibility. That is a cognitive explanation: it is based on information processing.

In 2014, however, a research team did a brain scanning experiment on bystander effects. A simulated emergency occurred while participants were in a brain scanner.

Activity in a brain area specialized for preparing action was diminished when more people were nearby. The readiness to act was greater when fewer people were nearby (Hortensius and Gelder, 2014).

Does that contradict the standard explanation? No. Does it provide a better explanation? Maybe not.

But it is valuable as a different perspective. It shows that the same phenomenon can be studied from different angles without contradiction. The brain scanning results agreed with results obtained through other means.

The Future

In the future, it is safe to say, there will be greater specialization in psychology, as an "inevitable consequence of increasing specialization of knowledge" (Bower, 1993). Specialties like psychoneuro­immunology, which combines psychology, neuroscience, and immunology, are now commonplace.

Specialization need not imply fragmentation. There are clear integrative trends in psychology.

Fields such as cognitive neuroscience cut across old boundaries between different specialties. Evolutionary psychology combines insights from evolutionary biology and psychology. Chapter 14 (Frontiers of Psychology) discusses several cross-disciplinary approaches: Psychology and Medicine, Psychology and Law, and Sport Psychology.

What seems to be fading away in modern psychology is the conflict between different approaches. Biological, behavioral, humanistic and cognitive approaches are freely combined.

Unlike their predecessors, many young psychologists do not feel compelled to take sides or choose between different approaches to psychology. They apply different points of view to the same issue.

What are some "integrative trends" in today's psychology? What "seems to be fading away"?

Researchers of today tend to focus not on competing schools of thought but on particular problems. They feel free to use any per­spective that sheds light on the problem. Typically they value a variety of approaches to psychology and feel free to combine them.

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References:

Bower, G. H. (1993). The fragmentation of psychology? American Psychologist, 48, 905-907.

Hortensius, R. & Gelder, B. D. (2014). The neural basis of the bystander effect. Neuroimage, 93, 53-58.

Robins, R. W., Gosling, S. D., & Craik, K. H. (1999) An empirical analysis of trends in psychology. American Psychologist, 2, 117-128.


Write to Dr. Dewey at psywww@gmail.com.


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